Mr Cranbrook: a Congregational minister in Dundee

Congregationalists are grounded in local churches. The congregation is the source of the authority of such minimal central and co-ordinating structures as are necessary to sustain the denomination. A proper balance between local and central bodies is not always easy to maintain. (A history of Scottish Congregationalism is here (pdf).)

Early ministry 

(timeline and bibliography here. Biographical background is largely taken from Kathleen Chator, James Cranbrook, in The Congregational History Society Magazine, Volume 7 No 4 Autumn 2014, pp.161-167 (pdf) Her particular focus is “the role of black people in the religious life of the United kingdom in past centuries.” p.161.)

James Cranbrook was baptised in 1819 and trained for the ministry at Highbury College, London (1836-1840), a highly regarded dissenting academy (wiki). He followed a meandering ministerial career. His first post (1840-42) was in Wickham Market, Suffolk, where he married Charlotte Frost. They were to have five sons and six daughters. In 1843 they moved to Soham, Cambridgeshire, and were in Ireland in 1847, two years into the potato famine. 

In 1848 the family returned to England where James became the first minister of Newhall Hill Unitarian Church, Birmingham (Image, Birmingham Museums). This appointment would be held against him in years to come as, at the very least, probable evidence of long-standing heterodoxy. 

From Birmingham they moved to Stratford-upon-Avon (1850) and, the following year, to Liscard in Cheshire where they remained for 14 years. For some of this time Cranbrook was also Professor of English Literature at Queen’s College, Liverpool. (The College was an association of the Royal Institution and the Mechanics Institute “based upon the fundamentally false idea that instruction of this type could be made to pay its own expenses” it failed to succeed and closed in 1879, British History Online.)

Dundee

On January 1st 1865 the family moved to Dundee where Cranbrook had been appointed minister of Albany Street Independent Chapel (flikr; also notes on the building, including mention of a culpable homicide in the chapel soon after it was opened). 

Cranbrook established himself as a sort of public theologian of a modern and optimistic flavour. In February 1865 he advertised a series of seven lectures with the general title of “The Message the Gospel Modern Society,” (Caledonian Mercury - Saturday 04 February 1865 p1 col8) and in May he published “The Church of the Future, indicated by the Tendencies of Modern Thought and Feeling” price 3d. 

Plague and fear

By the autumn of 1865 and into 1866 cattle plague was rife and there was a high level of public anxiety not least because of the significant probability of cholera. The churches turned to prayer. 

Part of Cranbrook’s response to public anxiety was to set out two conceptions of Providence: first, “that God is constantly and directly interfering in the movements of nature and the events of the human life”. The second, which he embraced, held that God, having “at one intuitive glance” comprehended all that was necessary to achieve his plan, “all that remained was to bring it into existence by the creation of various forms of being, and the establishment of these general laws.” (A version of the clock-maker account of creation wiki.) 

Once done, Cranbrook asserted, God did not step outside his scheme: 

“... our Creator always acts by a fixed natural order,” he said, “never in opposition to that order or independently of it.“  (John o’Groats Journal, Thursday 26 October 1865, p.4, cols.4-5.) 

This was ‘natural Providence’ and Cranbrook would defend it. A logical consequence was that interceding with God to change the course of events was both useless and hubristic, as though mere mortals could sway an omnipotent God by pester-power.  Nonetheless, he said, he prayed daily. He urged those with 

“any kind of temporal burden, any trial, any sorrow … to go with that to God by prayer, and He will be your helper as no other possibly could be.” (Caledonian Mercury - Tuesday 14 November 1865 p2 Col2)

I think Cranbrook displayed a tin ear In his public statements on God’s mode of action. He seems to have imagined that people generally thought like him. He overestimated communal reason and underestimated the contagion of anxiety. In denying that prayer would induce God to change the course of nature he also denied people one small source of comfort and control that they could hold to, not least in the face of the invisible and unpredictable plague. 

However his motivation was also powerfully emotional, if in a different direction. In the face of “.. that movement about Providence and Plagues. The disgust I felt at the superstitious language used upon the subject at some meetings of the Edinburgh clergy compelled me to preach that notorious sermon.“ (The Scottish Congregational Magazine, 1877, New Series Vol. XVII, p. 125). 

Cranbrook’s sermon diminished the value of interceding with God in these circumstances; it also implicitly trivialised the attempts of other clergy to offer comfort and hope through prayer. He implied that their expressions of faith and the content of their sermons were inferior to his. It cannot have helped his standing with colleagues that his comments were welcomed by the renowned secularist George Holyoake as “a refreshing breeze on the face of the mind of those who recollected the impossibility of mooting such opinions not many years ago.” (The Scotsman - Tuesday 05 December 1865 p2 col3) 

Prayer and plague

In 1865 Cranbrook published his sermons on the plague as Divine Providence in its Relation to Prayer and Plagues. It was reviewed in The Scottish Congregational Magazine January 1866, pp.13-20. 

The sermons had, an anonymous reviewer said, gained “a very inevitable notoriety”. While faithful Christians were imploring God in prayer for aid in the face of tragedy, Cranbrook offered "a more excellent way". He saw the spectres of secularism and materialism lurking behind the sermon. The reviewer was also, I think, malevolent in gratuitously tainting Cranbrook by association with two secularist writers he doesn’t name:

"No just notion," says one of them, "of the true nature of history is possible without a perception of the inviolability of the chain of second causes, and of the impossibility of miracles.” Or in the words of another, "Therefore, we shall maintain this principle of historic criticism, that no recital of the supernatural can be admitted as such, that it implies always credulity and imposture.” (p.14.)

(The first quotation was from George Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, 1835-36; first English edn. Trans, George Eliot, 1846;  the second from Ernst Renan’s Life of Jesus. Both authors would have been notorious and anathema to the majority of Congregationalists. The immediate source of both quotes was probably The Reformed Presbyterian Magazine, November 1865, p,402)

Darwin’s Evolution of Species had been published in 1859. Implicit in the criticism of Cranbrook was that he was doomed to the secular hell of evolution.

Then, almost as an afterthought to the process of establishing guilt by association, the reviewer tells his readers that Cranbrook stops ‘long before’ he gets to evolution but that he is nonetheless ‘in accord’ with such novel thinking. The inevitable consequence will be

“... alas! not only to exclude the supernatural in answering prayer, but to shut it out from history, thus making the record of our Lord's miracles a myth, and even, as far as is possible, from creation, teaching that man was not directly created by God, but sprang from another animal, and that again from another, until the direct work of God is found in the germ of some monad.” (p.24)

Cranbrook is damned for what he hadn’t said as much as for what he had. 

The reviewer turned to prayer. He quotes Cranbrook saying that prayer is “a most healthy, spiritual exercise” (p.16) and (p.17) “I have never said or implied God could not change the processes of nature if he chose; but I assert that, so far as experience tells us, they are never changed.” On the contrary, it is “impossible to overrate the importance to men of the fixedness of the laws by which God works in the universe and of our firm conviction of this.” (ibid.) 

Cranbrook envisaged science as a constitutive part of humanity’s growing into adulthood. As knowledge replaced ignorance, so God’s tutelage would withdraw and humanity would stand on its own feet: “The dealings of earthly parents with their children are of a similar character.”(p.18) His reviewer, by contrast, cites examples of prayer in the Bible as proving “that God answers prayer not only through the laws of nature, but supernaturally.”(p.19). The epistemic gulf between writer and critic was unbridgeable. Neither spoke to the other.

Cranbrook concluded: 

“As the earthly parent, to whom we have referred already, would be esteemed far more, who at the expense of the perfection of his machine, saved his child, so will God, using the physical universe for man's good, and adapting even its laws to the changes introduced by human will, seem far more loveable and truly glorious than when, whatever changes man makes, or whatever be his circumstances, He is conceived as invariably pursuing his original plan, regardless of the prayer of the destitute and the cry of the miserable.” (p.20)

Cranbrook excluded

The Scottish Congregationalists were beautifully bureaucratic. They held their annual conference In April each year and preparations followed a well-practised timetable. In 1866, however, one preparatory group, the Committee of the Theological Hall (which would customarily have participated in decisions concerning conference arrangements) had not met as it ought, but the speakers’ sub-committee continued undeterred (22 February). This group named Cranbrook as one of four speakers. One committee member voiced an anxiety that he might “introduce some matters that were not of a pleasant kind which had been agitating the minds of the people of late”; but he was reassured by his colleagues. (Dundee Advertiser, 3 May 1866 p4 Cols 1&2) Cranbrook accepted the invitation, and also that of chairing the ‘conversazione’. Meetings would take place, as in previous years, in both Augustine Chapel and Albany Street (on different sides of the city).

Then, out of gear, the speakers’ sub-committee was summoned to a joint meeting of the subcommittees of the Congregational Union and that of the Theological Hall (the executive committees of both bodies). They met on 12th March. The speakers’ sub-committee was told to overturn their decision on conference speakers on the grounds that “Mr Cranbrook did not possess the confidence of the Churches.” They protested, asked how they knew he did not have the Churches' confidence, but they were outvoted and Cranbrook disinvited. The meeting also decided (against many years of custom) to hold all meetings in Augustine church and none in Cranbrook’s Albany Street chapel on the risible fiction of greater convenience. On March 30th “the whole matter was referred to the General Committee of the Union.” (Dundee Courier, 28 April 1866 p2 Col 6). The General Committee approved the minutes of the previous meeting and ignored any question of Cranbrook’s participation in the Conference.

A week later, March 19th, Cranbrook was invited, or summoned, by Dr. W.L. Alexander to meet ‘in friendly conference’ with some of the ministers who had been present when Cranbrook was first welcomed to Albany Street Church. This too must have been planned earlier. 

  “The object they have in view in this conference is to ascertain your views on some points of revealed truth on which they have been led to believe that you hold views very different from those hitherto held and taught in our churches.

  “In taking this step they do not pretend to assume any right to control your liberty of thought or speech. They desire only satisfaction for themselves, that they may whether they can consistently continue to recognise you as a brother minister.” (Dundee Advertiser, Friday 27 April 1866, p4 col.6. A fuller account of the correspondence is collected in The Congregational Magazine, A. Fullerton & Co. Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, 1888, pp159-204.)

Cranbrook, not unreasonably, took this summons as both unfriendly and unjust.  He declined:

                 “I cannot appear before your newly constituted Consistorial Court, and endure the inquisition you would subject me to. 

  I refuse to be catechised on the tenets of that most tyrannical of all impositions, an unwritten creed—the true character of which is not disguised by calling it "views hitherto held and taught in our churches." 

  I refuse to be tried by Judges who have anticipated their verdict, by allowing themselves to be “led to believe''(iio)  that I hold views very different from those hitherto held." 

  I refuse, in vindication of the liberty freely to teach what I have learned of God, …[and also] for the sake of all others who may come under your suspicions of heresy, ..” (Dundee Advertiser, 27 April 1866 p4 col 7)

He questioned why mere presence at his service of welcome would qualify a minister to pass judgement on him. He protested that, in elevating one group of independent ministers over another, his equals had become his judges. 

Breaching the principles of the Congregational Union

It made no difference. A recurrent feature of heresy is that the offence is deemed so grave, so threatening and, perhaps, contaminating, that procedural justice becomes a secondary consideration at best and, not infrequently, a casualty. 

Albany Street Church subsequently set up a committee to review the whole affair. It concluded that “In so acting they [those who discarded Cranbrook] manifestly violated the articles of the Constitution of the Union, which emphatically disclaim any right to interfere with the religious opinions of its members.” (Dundee Courier, 28 April 1866, p2 col5.) They added, “This conduct should be condemned.” 

There was, they said, 

  “...evidence of an amount of irregularity and unbusiness-like procedure which would not be tolerated for an instant in any other Society in the world.”  There were wider implications, the authors also 

  “earnestly recommend all members of the Union who value their Congregational rights, and who desire to protect the ministers of Congregational churches connected with the Union in the free and conscientious discharge of their duty to their respective congregations, to take into their serious consideration the necessity of adopting some measure which should effectually secure both congregations and ministers from [similar] proceedings ...” (ibid.)

Cranbrook had been publicly humiliated by being removed from the list of conference speakers and again by the summons. His congregation came to his defence:

“The whole of the proceedings of the Union Committee were fully discussed at a large meeting of the congregation … when a motion was unanimously adopted expressive of  undiminished confidence in Mr Cranbrook as their pastor, and of disapproval of the conduct of the sub-committee as unbusiness-like, unchristian, and in opposition to the principles of Congregationalism.” (The Scotsman, 24 March 1866 p2 col 5)

Cranbrook had offered his resignation to the Albany Street Deacons, though the meeting had not been informed of this. His offer was not accepted. (Letter from ‘A member of the Albany Street Church’, The Scotsman, 25 March 1866 p2 col 6) 

Sentence: excommunication

On 5 April 1866 Cranbrook received a letter of excommunication (dated 27 March). In it and by it, “the Congregational ministers in Edinburgh, Leith, Dalkeith, and Portobello have judged it competent to intimate to him that they withdraw their countenance from him as a minister.” (Dundee Advertiser, Tuesday 17 April 1866, col1) 

Process

No minister, Cranbrook complained angrily, had sought a private interview with him before making their public statement. They based their right to judge on their presence at the service in Albany Street when he was made Pastor. Did that, he demanded, confer a similar right on the Baptist and Presbyterian ministers who were also present? He was, he said, “... an Independent minister of an Independent church; and, I feel, if I conceded the right thus claimed,  I should be sacrificing my people’s independence as well as my own.”  Further, he had never claimed their recognition and they could ignore him if they chose. And although they had suggested a meeting to “explain certain points of doctrine they had allowed themselves to believe I hold erroneous views of,” they had not told him what those points were. 

“Finally, most sincerely I say, I hold no animosity towards those ministers for what they have done.” and yet, “...I trust that there is none of them too old to live long enough to become ashamed of the part he has taken in these ill-advised proceedings.” (Dundee Advertiser  Saturday 28 April 1866 p3 col6) This may have stretched the everyday understanding of “sincerely”.

In Cranbrook’s defence

On May 1 1866, two days before the Congregational Union’s conference convened, a public meeting was arranged by Cranbrook's supporters in the Lamb’s Head Hotel, Dundee. It received a detailed report of the course of events and attendees expressed their unanimous support for their minister. There was criticism of the manner in which Cranbrook had been treated and of the way his opponents had represented affairs in the press. (Dundee Advertiser - Saturday 21 April 1866 p2 col7). 

The report acknowledged that, amongst Congregationalists outside Albany Street chapel, unease and discontent with Cranbrook was widely shared. But that did not justify removing him from the list of conference speakers in a manner described as “deliberately insulting” and intended “to be regarded as an expression of disapproval of his religious opinions. In having so acted they [a small group around one Dr Methven] manifestly violated the articles of Constitution of the Union, which emphatically disclaim any right to interfere with the religious opinions of its members.” (ibid.)

Ignoring procedural justice is not uncommon when there has been an accusation of heresy. It seems that heresy is felt to be so egregious that politeness, legality, honesty and due process may justifiably be jettisoned in the visceral compulsion to expel the heretic. Perhaps such behaviour is also deemed necessary and appropriate to express the ordure with which heretical opinions are regarded.

Defiance, sympathy and support

On Friday 27 April 1866 another meeting was held of “members of the Independent Churches in Dundee who sympathise with the Rev. James Cranbrook”, which was not everyone. It followed up an earlier meeting on the 13th and presented a detailed account of events compiled by twelve men from six local churches (as set out above).

The group found that “some dissatisfaction was felt in various parts of the country at his having been chosen as a representative man at these meetings” in response to what were regarded as Cranbrook’s “peculiar views” on prayer. Opposition to Cranbrook appeared to be strong in the Edinburgh area, adding a compounding dimension: Dundonian resentment at interference from metropolitan ministers.

The committee responsible for the conduct of the Annual Meeting had

“... overturned the arrangements which had been made with him in such a manner as leaves no doubt … that they intended their rejection of Mr Cranbrook to be regarded as an expression of disapproval of his religious opinions. In so acting they manifestly violated the articles of Constitution of the Union, which emphatically disclaim any right to interfere with the religious opinions of its members.” (Dundee Advertiser - Saturday 21 April 1866 p2 col7)

Heresy and injustice

There is something so objectionable in heresy that it is not infrequently met with steps which breach the procedural rules of the church concerned, as though the greater offence justifies the lesser. In Cranbrook’s case  

“Your Committee found … evidence of an amount of irregularity and business-like procedure which would not be tolerated for an instant in any well-conducted Society.” (ibid,)

However, debating the sequence of events or the morality of the accusers could not alter the fact of Cranbrook’s exile. Albany Street congregation and its minister had significant decisions to take amidst contradictory loyalties. Either Cranbrook resigned or the whole church severed its connection with the Congregational Union. But first,

“... this meeting … approve the conduct of the Deacons and highly approve of the position taken by our pastor in reference to the inquisitorial treatment which he has received from the Independent ministers of the neighbourhood; and that they agree to wait patiently till they see what may be done at the meeting of the Congregational Union, …

   2nd, That the meeting express their sincere thanks to the brethren in Dundee for their kind sympathy with this Church.”(ibid.)

Resignation and a new beginning

Cranbrook resigned in February 1867.  With some supporters he moved to Hopetoun rooms on Albany Street, where he set up an independent worshipping community. 

A prominent Church of Scotland minister, David Aitkin (wiki) recorded in his diary:

SEPTEMBER Sunday, 8 [1867]. I heard in Hopeton rooms Cranbrook, the rejected(sic) by the Independents, his prayers read, studied compositions, prose hymns of Adoration & praise. 

The sermon or address unlike any preachment I ever heard. Nature glorified - "immanency" of God in it - sounding Pantheistic, if not, then Transcendental. 

In no part of the service was the name of the Saviour introduced; he contrasted with the modern view that of the old Hebrews as to the relations of God to Creation, he said nothing of the Christian view, nor was there any reference whatever to Christianity, even the prayers were not presented in the name of Christ. 

Still the strain of sentiment & feeling was earnest & devout. 

Hymns were chaunted to a Harmonion, so also the Lord's prayer. On each side of the desk stood a bouquet of flowers in a taper glass vase. Altogether a curious exhibition - the slender, swarthy, weird-like figure - delicately chizzled features & forehead - the keen eye rapt at times, giving fitting embodiment to a discourse intellectual & ideal.

(The diary of the Revd Aitkin. Vol.33. pp69-70. This is the only reference I have noticed to the colour of Cranbrook's skin.)

Members were, of course, not so sour. There was 'a large attendance' for tea on the church's first anniversary and the accounts showed a healthy surplus. (Dundee Courier - Wednesday 26 February 1868 p3 col.4) They received letters of support and encouragement from as far afield as India, the Cape of Good Hope, and New Zealand. In November 1868 they welcomed, as guest speaker, Professor Huxley (wiki), who spoke on The Physical Basis of Life and who had not been given a welcome elsewhere in the city (Dundee Advertiser - Monday 9 November, 1868, p.2 col4). 

But on Sunday, June 6, 1869 Cranbrook died (Dundee Courier, Monday, 7 June, 1869, p2 Col5). He had been unwell for the previous 18 months, and unable to work for the last three. He left Mrs Cranbrook ... with a large family. (Dundee Advertiser, Tuesday 8 June, 1868, p.3 col.4) With a certain morbid irony he died at home: 4, Trinity Crescent, Trinity. He was interred in Warriston cemetery, Edinburgh, accompanied by many mourners. 

-------------

In Hopeton rooms Cranbrook used hymn books he had compiled himself: 

Cranbrook, J. (1867). Hymns selected for divine worship. Edinburgh (Edinburgh, Turnbull and Spears, 1867), A reprint in 1870 was optimistically re-titled Hymns selected and adapted for divine worship and human encouragement (Edinburgh: Printed for Freemasons' Hall Congregation.)

Cranbrook, J., & Thin, J. (1868). A manual of devout song for common worship. Edinburgh: Published for use in the Hopetoun Rooms. (1868) 

Hymns Collected and adapted for Rational Worship, Temporary Issue, Edinburgh (1869). 

(A Dictionary of Hymnology, John Julian (ed.) NY, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892, p.1031-1032)